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New to Linux which OS to use?
(lemdro.id)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Aurora, it's the desktop version of massively popular Bazzite (which targets gaming). That means you'll find tons of up to date tutorials online (Bazzite tutorials are usually applicable unless they are about the few features Bazzite and Aurora diverge specifically).
I explicitly advise against Ubuntu and Mint for the reasons I outlined here. Ubuntu and Mint have the added downside that almost none of the guides you'll find about SteamOS will work: Different desktop, different philosophy.
People need to realize that since the success of Steam Deck the "old classics" of newbie recommendations are out of the window and what helps these users the most is a Linux distribution as close as possible to SteamOS but SteamOS is not available for random PCs, so Bazzite/Aurora are currently the way to go. Personally I like Fedora KDE but I shifted my stance since the linked post and trying out Aurora.
Bazzite is great on desktop, it's just more gaming focused than Aurora
Absolutely but people not interested in autolaunching Steam and other preinstalled launchers can use Aurora which is just the workstation flavor by the same people.
it doesn't auto launch anything on desktop
I installed Bazzite just last weekend and I was definitively greeted by a Steam client login window right after logging into SDDM. No idea what you're talking about.
i have to click the steam icon to launch steam
i have no idea what you're doing wrong on your desktop
Yeah my Bazzite definitely doesn't auto launch Steam. I think that might be an option during setup?
Been using it for over a year now. Never auto launched into Steam once.
I installed it in a VM and after installation Steam launched. Didn't check if that persists after several reboots. Why would I?
Then I tried Aurora and with the exception of a Terminal app in Plasma's quick launch panel and no gaming launchers installed, it's pretty much the same thing, so might just as well recommend Aurora instead of Bazzite if the person in question doesn't care much about gaming. It's the workstation variant of Universal Blue.
see? another person has the same result
you just got ratioed!
i tell you what bazzite does do. it installs a bunch of DE extensions that are not useful. they are very easy to disable
You really hate Bazzite, huh? Almost seems like it's your job.
I don't know, bud, I'm just saying that it is not the default and has not happened to me once in the past year, and one or two fresh installs.
It's literally just KDE
Mint loaded Steam via the package manager and it worked out of the box for me. There have been some games I had to try different versions of Proton with, but I have never found that to be not true for some games.
Just FYI in case you don't know - SteamOS has changed and is now based on Arch, which means Bazzite is still fundamentally different.
I personally went with Garuda Linux for two reasons:
Bazzite is probably easier to use for newbies (immutable, relatively stable update windows), but in terms of "I found a guide for SteamOS online on how to get game X working", Garuda will be much better. Also, Garuda devs included their Rani app, which helps the user take care of the OS, handling a lot of the maintenance.
Both are immutable distributions, meaning software installation via Flatpak and Distrobox is exactly the same.
System-level differences are mostly irrelevant which is a fundamentally different approach from Ubuntu, Mint, etc. where users are expected to juggle with PPAs to get newer drivers on their ancient Ubuntu LTS base.